Can
Box Music (Live 1971-1977)
[Mute]
Rating: 9.5
Im Anfang war die Tät. In the beginning was the deed. This is the first line of Goethe's
Faust and arguably the most famous words in the German language. The opening lines of the
Gospel of John, "In the beginning was the Word" are inverted in a penstroke. The whole Christian
tradition is turned on its head. We do not originate in the benediction of an incarnated word,
but in the hazard of an unmediated act. That single line contains an entire manifesto of work,
the rough beauty of human effort and human suffering. Can anything be quite as Protestant,
quite as German as that?
If ever there was a band to whom the Protestant work ethic could be applied, it is undoubtedly
Can. If there was music that discarded the timelessness of pop for the earthbound temporality of
experimentation, it is Can music. The sound of Can is the sound of labor, of unbelievable human
exertion. Other collective improvisers like the Mahavishnu Orchestra approach the idiom of the
mystical, while Can seems geared for construction. They had mastered a true industrial sound
before that term was squandered on the sound of sparse rhythm and dreary, martial noise under
Genesis P. Orange screaming: "Discipline!" ad nauseam. Can is itself an industry. Indeed, an
industrial revolution. Their product strains description.
The double disc Box Music (1971-1977) also eludes language. If architecture is frozen
music, then Can is liquid architecture. These five men build earthworks so impossibly elaborate
that it cannot even survive the process of its own construction: when the workmen have disappeared,
so has the building. Box Music outstrips the tight tapeloop experimentalism of classics
like Tago Mago and Future Days precisely because it is so heavy, so material: Jaki
Leibezeit's jackhammer drums, the pig-iron slabs of Holger Czukay's bass, Irmin Schmidt's bright
sheet metal keyboards, and the relentless industrial drill of Michael Karoli's guitars. The
cumulative effect would be machine-like if the collective sound were not so violent and haphazard.
The music remains organic because it sweats and suffers; you can hear fatigue and elation, strategy
and struggle. Silence is weakness.
Box Music culls non-professional recordings-- mostly cassette-- from the group's most
experimental years, the years when Japanese street poet Damo Suzuki handled the vocals, following
the departure of their original lead singer, the African-American Malcolm Mooney (who actually
appears on a track from 1975). Suzuki's role on Box Music is somewhat limited, but then
again, Can's music was never driven by vocals. The sound is too intensely collective to allow
space for a single voice, almost tribal. The title of their earliest recordings captures it:
Future Primitive. One can never tell whether it's the music of civilization coming or going.
It is always devouring itself.
The 14-minute "Voo Doo Right" from a 1975 show, is tribal savagery at its zenith, spiraling guitar
and keyboards into a huge bonfire, burning over wartime drums. The audience applauding cannot even
disrupt the listener; the whole affair approaches religion. The pyre skitters out into tight,
phase-shifted funk as Schmidt's keyboards surface. Karoli's guitar is lyrical and lysergic, looping
the upper air in serpentine passes before devolving into mechanized crunch. There is a momentary
interlude of jagged no wave exchange of sloppy strums and broken drums, coalescing into a graceful
bluesy reunion.
The jazz-fusion of "Fizz" and the calypso-classical of "Cascade Waltz" reveal a sense of humor that
would be unthinkable in the fractured noise of the 37-seven minute "Colchester Finale" from 1972.
"Colchester" completely dominates the second disc of the collection, chugging sloppily along like
the Velvet Underground's locomotive signature "Sister Ray" in space. Suzuki's beat whispering is
unnerving, rinsing in and out with the lightning cymbals, occasionally lashing out as sadistic
howls. The recording on "Colchester" is wretched, but the low fidelity effect is perfect. Flying
Saucer Attack might have been born out of this matrimony of lockstep synchronicity and dead,
white interference.
Eventually, the reviewer must concede that Box Music is simply a critical black hole,
swallowing every turn-of-phrase lightlessly; it will evade all my descriptions, comparisons and
evaluations. Nobody's thoughts can keep up with this music. It was born of deed, not of word; it
is from a time before or after language. Box Music is perfect work, pure expenditure.
Like a fire, it takes everything into itself, into its own all-consuming energy. All these words
we can toss on the fire, because you and I, we can't even come close.
-Brent S. Sirota